Silicon Valley Bank is a good reminder that startups, often entrenched in the world of risk and scrappiness, sometimes forget to think about the obvious: single points of failure. But just like it makes sense to rely on a community-friendly bank, so does entrusting a single person to lead your business to success. Now that we’ve seen the former not really work out, perhaps it’s time to rethink the latter.
TechCrunch+ polled a number of early-stage founders who are building companies that have raised a Series A or less, to understand how they think about succession. The consensus is that it’s not top of mind, or even top of the list, in a world where founders are more focused on runway, product-market fit and growth.
Can that be changed?
Moving a company’s success beyond the individual founder or chief executive tasked with being the face of it is hard. I mean, there’s a reason that VCs love co-founders: Eighty percent of billion-dollar companies launched since 2005 have had two or more founders, one study shows. At the same time, co-founder breakups are one of the most common reasons startups fail. Contradictions! We love them.
